A Quote by Hilary Mantel

I think psychologically [Margaret Thatcher] is really worth studying. I am reading Charles Moore's biography of her, and he has gotten us right there with a woman who lived the unexamined life, and lived it deliberately, and who has contempt for history, even her own.
I had to live and breathe Margaret Thatcher for a few months. I totally engulfed myself in her life. I read her autobiography and a biography, 'The Grocer's Daughter.'
Media hosts just talk about Golda Meir and Margaret Thatcher and again miss the point. I was talking about AMERICAN culture, ladies and gentlemen. As I pointed out, if Margaret Thatcher or Golda Meir, by the way, she didn't care, and Margaret Thatcher didn't care how she look like. If Margaret Thatcher were running for president today, as she was when she was the Iron Lady, we wouldn't have her mom doing television commercials telling us how wonderful she was when she was a kid and how nice she is.
Watching the Commons tribute to Margaret Thatcher was like being suffocated inside a gigantic sticky toffee pudding, but one with nasty bogeys planted inside. There was much of the 'Margaret Thatcher who was lucky enough to know me,' especially from her own side of the House.
[Margaret Thatcher] is a woman who, when she wrote her entry for "Who's Who," didn't include her mother. Now whether that was corrected in subsequent editions, I do not know.
My mother's father drank and her mother was an unhappy, neurotic woman, and I think she has lived all her life afraid of anyone who drinks for fear something like that might happen to her.
Every argument that Margaret Thatcher ever made internationally didn't have a great deal to do with her contempt for Communism - she never really got into that. What she talked about was giving freedom to tens of millions of people in Central and Eastern Europe. She was an inspirational leader when it came to discussing her belief in freedom. More visceral and moral.
Margaret Thatcher was beyond argument a great Prime Minister. Her tragedy is that she may be remembered less for the brilliance of her many achievements than for the recklessness with which she later sought to impose her own increasingly uncompromising views.
Gerda Lerner was fierce, brilliant and unique. She lived history by her bravery, restored history by her scholarship, and democratized its study by her activism.
All of us--all who knew her--felt so wholesome after we cleaned ourselves on her. We were so beautiful when we stood astride her ugliness. Her simplicity decorated us, her guilt sanctified us, her pain made us glow with health, her awkwardness made us think we had a sense of humor. Her inarticulateness made us believe we were eloquent. Her poverty kept us generous. Even her waking dreams we used--to silence our own nightmares.
I was doing an interview with Charlie Rose and he said, "What do you think about Margaret Thatcher?" - and I had not heard she had died at this point - and he said, "Is there any kind of Shakespearian overtone here?" I said, "Well, actually, Julius Caesar, because ever if a politician was stabbed in the back, it was Mrs. Thatcher, by all her conspiratorial cabinet, which really did just stab her in the back." It's a rather interesting resonance.
A woman with romance in her life lived as grandly as a queen, because her heart was treasured.
That one woman is capable of loving another is an historical truth; but never yet lived one who could not listen to her own praises at the expense of her adored friend.
[Margaret Thatcher] said there was no thing such as society. This is what I find so interesting psychologically. Where did she come from? She had no mother. Her father came from a very identifiable background: religious, highly conformist.
My maternal grandmother was the longest-lived of my grandparents. She migrated to Australia in her 80s and lived into her 90s. It was great that she got to be part of my adult life.
Where once the student was taught that the unexamined life was not worth living, he is now taught that the profitably lived life is not worth examining.
Politically, I thought [Margaret Thatcher] stank. I think she had a real fight on her hands to get where she got, but I don't believe that her conviction was for the greater good.
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